Exposures

Helmut Newton looks back.

What do we learn from the autobiography of Helmut Newton? I would be thrilled to report that Mr. Newton has lived a life of blameless quietude. How pleasant it would be to discover that, after a hard day spent taking photographs of strapping Prussian nudes, their marble-hard limbs girt in sheer stockings and the pelts of severely endangered species, he likes nothing better than to hurry home to an early supper, with a clan of children capering fondly at his feet. Such, however, is not the case. If his “Autobiography” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; $27.95) makes one thing clear, it is that, compared with his inflammatory existence, his photographs—which have sealed his notoriety over fifty years, and which are readily identified by no more than the slope of a buttock—are mere shadows on the wall.

He was born in 1920, in Berlin, which comes as no surprise. Indeed, wherever he has lived—dull suburban dumps, for the most part, like Singapore, Paris, and Monte Carlo—Newton has not so much registered his taut, nostalgic weakness for Berlin as carried Berlin with him. He always manages to find and photograph the kind of woman who would have been happiest when striding down the Kurfürstendamm in crisply laced ankle boots in the autumn of 1928. More cleverly, by way of a backdrop, he seems able to summon a Germanic time of day—or, better still, a granular night (“black light,” he calls it), heavy with the promise of corruption. The big revelation, therefore, is not that Newton is a Berliner but that he is a Berlin Jew. His real name is Helmut Neustaedter. His father, Max, was a wealthy button manufacturer, and the family conducted one of those nicely upholstered, entirely secular lives that made German Jewry feel—with good reason, and with unimagined consequences—as richly rooted in the national experience as any other part of the population. The Neustaedters celebrated Christmas rather than Hanukkah; Helmut and his half brother, Hans, never had a bar mitzvah, and Hans was not even circumcised. Their mother, Claire, was a snob and a spoiler with good legs, who fired a maid for dressing too well on her day off, and who clad the infant Helmut in patent-leather shoes and velvet suits with taffeta bows. That was the least of it: “I was brought up never to touch a banister. . . . I had my own private sandbox. . . . I used to faint all the time. . . . I also had very weak ankles.” Nevertheless, Claire was terrified “that her little Helmie would turn homosexual.”

She needn’t have worried. Boy, did he not turn homosexual. Little Helmie grew into big Helmie, and big Helmie did stuff with big girls that would have made liebe Mutti fall sideways into the sandbox. He even published a book called “Big Nudes,” and another, his first, called “White Women.” If some of Newton’s females—essentially, glaciers with breasts—stare at the camera through a monocle, a lens of their own, that is probably because Max Neustaedter affected the same habit. By far the most detailed portion of the “Autobiography” is set in Berlin, and rightly so, for without that boyhood there would have been nothing to pollinate the lush fantasies of the adult. What makes the book so alarming is its refusal to obey the rules. The cutie with the taffeta bows could so easily have grown up gay, and his status as a pawn of circumstance ought, by rights, to have lent some coloring of compassion to his subsequent art. Not so. Young Helmut felt the pressure of History, but his own history always came first. In the summer of 1935, he fell for an Aryan girl—a perilous motion of the heart, but, “when you’re fourteen years old and you’re in love, what do you do? Whatever it is, you certainly don’t think about Nuremberg racial laws!”

The laws had been drafted the previous year, and Helmut had seen the threat: “I was pretty much awake to it but didn’t give a shit one way or the other.” Many readers will frown at such irresponsibility, but it is easy to glance back in time and honor only the brave. It is harder, but just as necessary, to honor those who craved the basic freedom to be irresponsible. Newton attended the Heinrich von Treitschke Real Gymnasium, on Prinzregentenstrasse, which was every bit as pro-Nazi as it sounds, and got a Death Skull Certificate in swimming at the Berliner Schwimm Club; but what has remained with him is the precise density of the girls’ swimsuits, which “stayed wet for a long time,” and which may explain his lifelong addiction to pools and all who laze in them. Most startling of all is his recollection of Wannsee—to every other Jew in the world, the lakeside retreat where the Final Solution was planned, but to Helmut Newton a holiday haven of smooching and skin-warmed Nivea cream. “The smell of Nivea still has a sexual connotation for me.”

He was lucky to get out; somehow, all the Neustaedters made it. Not all his acquaintances were so lucky. Yva, a Berlin photographer to whom Helmut was briefly apprenticed, was murdered in Auschwitz. Helmut had long since left Germany, alone; his mother had bought him a railroad ticket to Trieste and a second-class steamer ticket to China. He stopped off at Singapore and stayed there, and this is where the “Autobiography” hots up. Somewhere in the wings of this book we catch the low rumble of war and persecution, but you can’t always hear it, because there at center stage—goatish, garish, and about as unobtrusive as a rock drill—is Helmut Newton making love.

First in line was Josette Fabien, a Belgian with a suite at the Raffles Hotel and a sister called Kitty. “Josette warned me early on that if she ever caught me in bed with Kitty she’d slit my throat from ear to ear,” he writes. Question: How many clichés can you count in that sentence? The older woman, the sweat of the Far East, the knife in the dark: the great thing about Newton’s memoirs is that he crams and pummels the clichés until they are restored to fresh meaning. He has the further temerity to insist not only that he lived them but that they were scandalously worth living; that is why they became clichés in the first place. He has long savored his reputation as a shocker, but the truth is that his photographs were shocking only to those who, for many years, ran and read the fashion magazines—those cautiously daring temples of the artfully veiled. What a Newton picture most resembles is a glaring advertisement for some secret product, some unmentionable leisure activity, of his own devising. He has stolen the styles of the Weimar Republic, postwar Eurotrash, and the loucheness of the Château Marmont, and rendered their heated transactions of flesh at a lowered temperature. He is the Joel Grey of the camera, presiding in mock amusement (though in genuine arousal) over his cabaret of cool.

In Singapore, he joined the Straits Times as a local photographer, and lasted two weeks. Soon, “I realized how far I was from the goal I’d set for myself of becoming a Vogue photographer. Instead I’d become a trained fucker.” The poor lamb. Newton was kept pretty busy not being a photographer in Singapore, although he regrets failing to trap “the Bengal Tiger,” a White Russian dancer with red hair. “I tried very hard to screw the Bengal Tiger, but I had no luck.” As for Josette, “our sexual relationship had advanced by leaps and bounds.” It is my solemn duty to inform the reader that this is almost certainly not a metaphor. “I mean, I was the perfect age,” Helmut remembers, adding shyly, “I was too good in bed.” Ah, yes, that old problem. He and Josette left town and took a house: “There were just the two of us, plus the cook and the maid and the chauffeur.” There, I suspect, is the core of the book—or, at any rate, the clearest signpost to the Newton oeuvre. His photographs are crazed with presagings of sex, yet what truly gets them going is class.

Consider the twilit trip that he made with Josette, when she first unzipped his fly in the back of her black Chevrolet. Two things arise from this poignant scene. First, how do you get dark-red lipstick off the crotch of white linen shorts? Second, “I don’t believe Josette was concerned about the driver seeing us at all.” And that is how it plays in a classic Newton shot: somebody trilling with desire, and somebody else not exactly out of the picture but more or less out of the running. The rich go about their dirty business while other folk look on, unmoved—either because they, also, are rich, and thus far too polite to be outraged (see his trio of guests lounging in a Venetian hotel while a woman strips), or because they are from the servant class, and thus not bona-fide players of the game. Hence his 1995 image in which a redhead in scarlet heels leans against a Berlin tree trunk and opens her coat. There is nothing underneath. Beside her, the chauffeur (his black Mercedes is parked in the background) stares with roughly the level of excitement that he would display if she were unwrapping liverwurst sandwiches for a picnic. That is why people complain about Newton: not because he strips women and poses them as sternly available but because, at the same time, he has the gall to make them untouchable. One thing alone will break the lock: whatever the Beatles may have promised, money can buy you love. Now, that is shocking.

In 1940, Helmut Newton left Singapore, before it fell to the foe, and travelled to Australia. Throughout his life, he seems to have kept one step ahead of real catastrophe, thus liberating himself to make waves of minor trouble. In Australia, he was housed in an internment camp for anti-Nazis (pro-Nazi Germans were separately housed), where he scrubbed the latrines and ate food that was silted up with red sand. In 1942, he was released and moved to the state of Victoria, where he picked peaches for a farmer with a daughter called Sunshine. After that, improbably, Newton joined the Australian Army, where he and his European comrades in arms saw no military action but plenty of the other variety. He and his friend Philip, a part-Jewish officer who had once been expelled from the Austrian cavalry, took a room that they christened Schloss Rammelfeste, or Castle Fuck Hard. Among their joint conquests was none other than Kitty, the forbidden sister of Josette. All in all, as the author delicately phrases it, “we really fitted into the community.”

After which, we sense the first flickers of success. Newton quit the Army, changed his name, and met an actress called June. The wedding took place in a Catholic church in Melbourne, in May, 1948. More than half a century later, they are still married, and the only loving photograph that I have ever seen by Newton is a Parisian shot of June in 1972—putting a match to her cigarette, seated at a dining table with a glass of wine, her top drawn aside like theatrical curtains, the better to display her bust. Newton records numerous flareups between man and wife, yet his book is admirably reticent on their shared privacy, as if profound affection, unlike pornographic lust, were something to be taken on trust rather than peeled apart. Then, out of nowhere, comes the sentence: “I was working on assignments for the Australian supplement of English Vogue, and in 1957 they offered me a twelve-month contract to work on Vogue in London.”

Huh? Nothing in the book has prepared us for this launch. A vague ambition has, without explanation, grown into a job offer. Basically, the “Autobiography” ends here, although it still has a hundred and fifty more pages to go. The struggles of young Helmut have been a joy to behold, whereas the progress—however wayward—of the crescent celebrity is at once wondrously accoutred and nothing special. To his credit, Newton himself admits as much, halting his story abruptly, in the early nineteen-eighties, “for to write about one’s successes, small or big, is simply of no interest to the reader.” If all public figures showed such fatigue in the face of their own importance, we would be spared a lot of creaking shelves in Barnes & Noble. There is plenty to relish in the second half of Newton’s memoirs—witness his astronomical memory of the Super Constellation in which he and June flew to Europe, “a gorgeous four-propeller airplane with big leather seats and a ceiling of a midnight-blue sky with stars”—but, once we are led on a familiar dance through the vale of Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman, something in the telling falls away.

There are moments where the “Autobiography” is barely written at all. If anything, it feels spoken, or shouted, or giggled into being: “So, anyway, there’s June cooking our first dinner of sausages.” The editing is subtle to the point of invisibility. I was pleased to be informed of the writer’s “rip-roaring affair” with a genitally challenged Polish countess on page 115, so much so that to learn, twelve pages later, of his “rip-roaring affair” with Betty—ennobled, in her way, by “the tiniest waist and great big breasts”—slightly took the edge off my delight. In the end, however, breathlessness can be relied upon to give a buzz. Few readers will be inspired to take up photography (indeed, Newton specifically cautions against it, on financial grounds), nor will they have a clue how to mimic the torrid manner of his work; but they will be plunged instantly into the Nivea cream of 1936, and that is what counts.

Did the Jewish teen-ager get a kick, in later life, from toying with the aesthetic of his natural enemies, or has he simply given them the finger? Why, as a portraitist, has he gravitated so giddily toward subjects such as Kurt Waldheim, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Leni Riefenstahl? Newton is no satirist, certainly; but he is an unabashed solipsist (“You know I never think of anybody else but myself”), and there is something endearing, and politically far from ineffectual, about the perpetual naughty boy who can’t help bumping into the high and mighty or knocking them aside. He may tremble in the presence of power—the entire book is worth buying for the moment at which he meets his “goddess,” Margaret Thatcher, “shortly after she abdicated”—but you can be sure, nevertheless, that when Newton gazes back, whether at Nazis, nudes, prostitutes, or politicians, he doesn’t give a damn. “I find this kind of living in the past useless and unproductive,” he writes, which, for an autobiographer, is saying something. Forget it, little Helmie. Bring on the girls. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”